Posted
by
kdawson
on Saturday August 07, 2010 @09:39PM
from the heads-gotta-roll dept.

ColdWetDog writes "Computerworld reports that Mark Papermaster has left his job as Apple's Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering. He was the senior executive in charge of engineering for the iPhone 4 and thus responsible in some unknown fashion for 'antennagate.' His name may ring bells from previous coverage of his jump from IBM to Apple. From a brief blurb on Daring Fireball: 'From what I've heard, it's clear he was canned. Papermaster was a conspicuous absence at the Antennagate press conference. Inside Apple, he's "the guy responsible for the antenna" — that's a quote from a source back on July 23. (Another quote from the same source: "Apparently the antenna guys used to have a big chip on their shoulder. No more.")'"Update: 08/08 03:01 GMT by KD: Swapped out a registration-required NY Times link for a Computerworld one; corrected the direction of Papermaster's career move.

The reception problem on the iphone really isn't that big of a deal. As opposed to fan boys there are haters too. However my experience with the iPhone 4 is that it's reception is about the same as other phones in the area that use AT&T (after say a minute for the bar counting algorithm to resolve. ) and a lot of the real disappointment was a lot of people were expecting the new design to have a noticeable difference. Then you have the haters who saw this one flaw and really put it out of proportion.

Same reason everyone uses *zilla to describe something big. Its part of modern culture.

Watergate was a huge scandal that, IIRCC, started with a low key investigation by a reporter into a burglary at the Watergate building that also happened to house an office of the Democratic party. It started small and ended up with a US President being forced to resign in order to avoid being impeached. Until that time most Americans trusted the government to follow the laws of the land.

Same thing has happened in regards to the antennae issues of the iPhone, it started with a few comments and has mushroomed into a real mess.

And please, anyone who wants to correct/amend my recollection of Watergate please do, I am feeling to lazy to Google it at the moment.

Even if they don't know the origin of the meme they still use it because it is known and generally understood by the masses, where as an attempt to introduce a new meme would require a bit of work on their part to promote it. So they just stick to what they know works. Perhaps its more of a "if it works don't fix it" kind of laziness rather than a lack of originality.

Though there does seem to be a fair amount of regurgitation in articles these days.

1) "Bonds aren't guaranteed" - true in a philosophical sense, but it the real world, bonds are as good as it gets. As in better than stock. As in way better than a contract that the company owes someone. The major risk in bonds is sudden inflation (interest rate rise), but this is a shared problem with any transaction. Bonds are, sorry, were, good as gold. In a bankruptcy, bond owners get paid first. In your personal death example, the bond owners go to the front of the line when it comes to payouts. Above

Watergate wasn't even a real scandal; it was dressed up to look like a scandal by politicians who felt they needed to give the appearance of upholding moral standards (when in fact, as politicians, they had none to begin with).

Jean Baudrillard in his book "Simulations" explains it very nicely. Watergate was a simulation of a scandal.

Well, if Jean Baudrillard says it's just a dress up, then by all means it's a dress up. Grow up. Nixon and Kissinger were knee deep in corruption and their arrogance ended up tripping themselves up.

didn't Apple go on the offensive to illustrate that ALL smart phones had an attenuation problem if held the right (wrong?) way? Then they fire someone for it. Basically their saying "yeah, we knew there was someone to blame for the design all along but we couldn't admit that publicly and force a recall...that would cost too much money. Lets lie instead, that costs less. We'll quietly shove him out the door when all the hoopla dies down." It can't both be everyone's and one persons problem at the same time. I call bullshit through deductive reasoning.

Well just because all the phones have problems, doesn't mean that apple wants to strive to be better. What if the head of the OSX group put out a product as bad as Windows Vista? Should he not get fired because hey, Vista has problems too.

Now, if you take Apple at its word that its antenna performance is as good (or bad) as every one else, isn't it still possible, that they wanted it to be better, but it didn't turn out that way?

There's the basic problem all phones have of the human body (the hand, specifically) reducing the signal quality by a very small amount. This is physics, and is absolutely unavoidable.

Then there's the much more serious problem of bridging a contact on the iPhone's case, which de-tunes the antenna and thereby reduces the signal quality far beyond the usual signal loss caused by holding a phone in your hand.

Jobs tried to cover up the problem specific only to iPhones by confusing it with a problem all phones have. Without the bumper case (which prevents your hand from bridging the antenna) the iPhone's antenna performance is significantly worse than any other phone on the market. Period.

That's not exactly what I call "making it better". They had a serious, and frankly stupid, design flaw caused by Apple wanting metal on the outside of the case for aesthetic purposes. Jobs basically called his customers stupid for pointing out there was a problem, and then fired the guy ultimately responsible (though not directly to blame for the problem).

ALL CELL PHONES, ALWAYS will have their antenna detuned by a human's touch, and THEY ALL have a death spot.Sure do. Show me any cell phone, I'll show you how to detune the antenna, and I'll find it's death spot.

It's not just a matter of detuning, but how much it gets detuned. For example, this story [anandtech.com] claims a significant drop of signal compared to a couple other phones (iPhone 3GS and HTC Nexus One). For example, when the reviewer clenched tightly the iPhone 4, he got a 24 dB drop in signal. The HTC Nexus One does 7 dB better (which is more than a factor of 5 stronger signal) and the iPhone 3GS does a full 10 dB better (slightly more than a factor of ten stronger signal). "Holding naturally" still has an almost 20 dB drop in signal strength for the iPhone (that's a factor of hundred drop in signal strength) while the iPhone 3GS has almost no attenuation in signal strength.

1. iPhone has antenna problems2. All radio phones have antenna problems3. Papermaster has left Apple

All three facts are correct. No amount of logical reasoning can override reality.

The rumor part of this is that he was sacked for screwing up the antenna. Whether this is true or not can have absolutely zero impact on the reality of the three facts above, even though it may appear to logically conflict with at least one of the above. The reason for this is that people's actions are not necessaril

Actually, by definition, this is all histerical, just not ha ha histerical... but slap you in the face until you stop raving, histerical. Apple was burned by Gizmodo, and ravenous Apple zealots, not the antenna design, in the same way radio listeners were burned (once upon a time, remember radio?) by Orson Wells. Histerical.

didn't Apple go on the offensive to illustrate that ALL smart phones had an attenuation problem if held the right (wrong?) way? Then they fire someone for it. Basically their saying "yeah, we knew there was someone to blame for the design all along but we couldn't admit that publicly and force a recall...that would cost too much money. Lets lie instead, that costs less. We'll quietly shove him out the door when all the hoopla dies down." It can't both be everyone's and one persons problem at the same time. I call bullshit through deductive reasoning.

Papermaster was earning a massive salary with consistent stock options coming his way. With these perks come professional responsibilities. Perhaps we'll eventually find out he misrepresented his antenna design to Jobs by not having such down falls. However you slice it, he's a professional and professionals take their lumps.

Their first phase was just flat out denial. The iPhone didn't have any problems, they had no idea what you were whining about. Users were just being dumb about shit. Shut up and buy it. The second phase was claiming that this problem was well known, and applied to all phones. This was the one that accompanied a bunch of media blitz and their videos of other products, and drew ire from their competitors. Their third, quite phase, was to not admit they had a problem, but acknowledge they would try to make people happy by giving out bumpers for free. Now their fourth, mostly internal, phase seems to be blaming it on an individual, rather than a culture of arrogance or the individual at the top who might be responsible.

Basically this has just been a massive problem for them because they very much have a culture of not admitting wrong doing. They are always brilliant, everything they do is brilliant, and so on. They probably even believe that internally to a degree (companies often drink their own marketing coolaid pretty heavy). So they wanted to pass this off as not a problem, but people wouldn't let them, they kept hammering on it and presenting proof, as well as threatening lawsuits. Then they tried to spin it as something that was just a general problem, their design had nothing to do with it. Well their competitors weren't letting them get away with that. RIM in particular was extremely angry and might have filed suit. So now they've had to choice of if not to admit at least acknowledge they fucked up.

As happens in many organizations not used to admitting fault, there has to be a fall guy. The guy at the top can never be wrong, and clearly the whole organization can't be wrong. So one (or sometimes a few) person who was high enough to be important has to be blamed for the problems and get punished for it.

You see this happen in other places. Militaries it is pretty common. There's a major fuckup and the person at the top doesn't get punished, a mid level general does. There's no overall change of the organization and the top commanders take no responsibility, a fall guy is chosen and they internally pat themselves on the back for fixing the problem.

The proper response if you don't know is "We don't know if this is an issue, we are investigating if there are any truth to the claims."

As for the videos, well they were an attempt at disinformation. See there are two issues that affect the iPhone 4:

1) Signal attenuation due to hands being near it. This is the case with ALL phones. You interfere with the signal a bit by holding it. However, even in the very worst case, if you wrap two hands around it, you get maybe 10dB of attenuation. Over all it isn't a real problem.

2) Signal attenuation due to detuning the antenna. When you hold the iPhone such as to bridge the gap between the two parts of the antenna, that changes its characteristics and detunes it. This causes fairly large signal attenuation, as much as 20dB (and remember dB is logarithmic). This does not affect other phones as they don't have their antennas where you can make physical, and thus electrical, contact.

They deliberately attempted to conflate the issues and make it look like everyone had the same problem, which they didn't and hence the strong response from RIM.

Also trying to pretend like nobody would know this might happen is stupid. One of our professors at work had me grab a video of the problem to use at a presentation. Why? Because she's been researching the problem of detuning of antennas like this for 4 years and this is a good demonstration of it happening. However, as often happens with Apple, form took precedence over function and marketing won the day. It just came back to bite them. Same general thing as all the 18 month timecapsule failures. They demanded the PSU go inside which left too much heat in the unit, causing it to fail early. However marketing wanted it slick and that's what happened.

Apple made a mistake, and they've been scrabbling around with it ever since. You are correct that I don't know his firing is related, but it seems likely.

Make no mistake about it. The antenna was put where it is, on the outside because Jony Ive was in love with the design. Sure, Papermaster had to sign off on the design, but I assure you it's very difficult to say no to Jobs or Ive within Apple.

If Papermaster was indeed held responsible for a problem that stemmed from Jony (backed by Steve Jobs), then it's probably to his benefit that he is gone.

I would however agree with the idea that the antenna people have big chips on their shoulders. I'm not saying they never did anything right, but they think every one of them is better than nearly any person outside Reuben's group.

So I don't know where Gruber gets his info, but going by what I've seen he's only right about half the time so I wouldn't get too wrapped up in what he says.

Finally, I'll say this about the situation. I wouldn't read too much into this antenna stuff. There have been signs of trouble for a while. When the iPhone 4 was announced (before antennagate), you saw Bob Mansfield in the announcement but not Mark Papermaster. And no matter how much people outside the company may talk about the P.A. Semi group (which reported to Papermaster), virtually all the internal chip work was really stemming from Mansfield's group. I think it's likely Papermaster found his responsibilities had already been stripped away before the iPhone 4 launch, perhaps even before he showed up for his first day.

I still know a lot of people at Apple, and I hadn't heard any rumblings to the effect that Papermaster wasn't happy there, or that Apple wasn't satisfied with his performance. Of course, it's not like the man is going to find it hard to land another job.

Papermaster was in-charge of the iPhone 4 design and it's interaction with all the hardware specs. Jony is an industrial designer, not an RF Engineer/Scientist. That's Papermaster's domain. He could have very easily vetoed his own antenna design that he developed within Ivy's design team's aesthetics. He has to own it.

Jony puts the antenna on the outside. Then product design gets to try to make the best of it.

The problem with the antenna is you can easily touch it. And Jony's aesthetic was that the antenna would be on the outside.

You can say he should own even the antenna being on the outside, but if you do, you must never have tried to change the Jobs/Ive bloc's mind before. VP's don't get vetoes over Jobs' wishes. If he wants an antenna design that has inherent flaws in design (not just implementation) then he gets it. He is the boss.

Overheating laptops.Less than usable mice (several times! the puck was just the beginning!)Power supplies with cords so thin they break.iPod shuffles that can't be used with 3rd party headphones because the design doesn't have any buttons on it.iPhones with recessed headphone jacks that can't work with 3rd party headphones.Mac Minis (and laptops, the first titaniums) with impaired wireless reception.

These problems are not the products of a company that lets those who have practical concerns alter an industrial design selected by Ive/Jobs in the ways necessary to correct their flaws. And you can't blame it all on Papermaster.

Even though his departure may not have been solely caused by the antenna problem with the iPhone, at least someone at the top level got kicked out at Apple after a huge screw up. No one has been punished at BP, Halliburton or TransOceanic. Although Tony Hayward was forced out as president, he was put to another big important position, and you know he was given some huge amount of money/stocks to make up for his troubles. They sent him to Russia because there is almost no english language reporting about the Russian oil industry, and out of sight is out of mind.

When you get to the top and get that obscene salary, part of the job should be that you take a bullet when things screw up. In American, it is rare for any executive to suffer in the sightest fashion for big problems, even when it is their fault.Just look at Wall St. and the crash. No one got dinged.

You can bitch about Apple about a lot of things, but at least someone got the axe. There needs to be a lot more of that at the top level if American business is ever going to be honest or meaningful again.

While I've got a fair bit of disdain for Apple, the iPhone 4 antenna seems novel and effective, albeit critically flawed. IMHO, the designers should be praised for generating a new and potentially useful idea, while the testers should be fired for not finding this flaw before release. Given Apple's strange punitive actions, I predict the next iPhone will have a very conventional antenna design, which keeps it from pulling ahead of the competition, while the same poor quality control allows some other issu

"the next iphone" is perhaps the biggest test. Everybody makes mistakes. They are absolutely unavoidable. You pour all the money in the world into testing, but eventually something will slip through. (and note I'm not meaning this in the way of letting Apple off the hook...it does seem as if they did NOT do adequate real world testing on the iPhone 4).

However, the real test is how one recovers. If the next iPhone has another hugely reported on flaw like the iPhone4, well in retrospect the iPhone4 might be t

I think the interesting question is whether they put the antenna inside in the next iPhone (thus implicitly suggesting it was a mistake to put it outside in the first place) or leave it on the outside.

Papermaster left IBM for Apple. In fact, IBM sued to keep him, saying he had trade secrets that shouldn't be shared. Apple had to wait a few months to get him because of this suit. Ironic that after fighting to get him they're dumping him so soon. If he's the head honcho responsible for the antenna problem (assuming it exists) you have to applaud Apple for holding people responsible for their failures. Are you paying attention Microsoft?

Maybe I'm just naive, but to me the story fed by Apple has been fairly consistent. I don't understand all the accusations of lies and the rest of it. I also don't understand all of the posts here about "either its a problem with the design and they should fire someone or its not a problem with the design and they should fire no one."

This all seems logical to me:

All smart phones have signal issues when you hold them a certain way

iPhone 4 is worse than most when you bridge the gap between the antenn

When taken as a whole it's not underhanded or inconsistent or anything like that. Then you look at the calendar of events in regards to their statements and you realize they're a bunch of elitist pricks trying to take everyone for a ride.

First they said there was nothing wrong with it and you were holding it wrong and if you had a problem stfu and go buy a bumper.Then they said it was similar to other phones (it's not even close to the same but RDF Activate!)Then they said it was a software error.Then people started proving there was a problem and Apple had to have a press conference where Jobs lied his ass off or made completely misleading of fallacious comparisons and they said they would give people a free bumper.Then they fired this guy.

(Note: I think the way Apple handled this issue is a much much bigger problem than the actual antenna design, which is honestly pretty minor in the grand scope of phone problems.)

(Note: I think the way Apple handled this issue is a much much bigger problem than the actual antenna design, which is honestly pretty minor in the grand scope of phone problems.)

I have to disagree with the idea that the antenna of a telephone having issues is a minor problem.

It should be imperative that the antenna be absolutely as strong as possible, because it's a goddamned cell phone. The whole point of the thing is to make phone calls.

I'll grant you that the antenna issue was not as big as it appeared to be at first, but when you're spending $500+ for a phone, you expect to get the best reception possible. The antenna is not an area that should be skimped, and I do believe that it was Jobs' fault for pushing aesthetics over functionality, and leaving his engineering team stuck with having to make everything work given the aesthetics dreamt up by the art department.

The rest of your post I agree with. Not that any of this ever affected my decision to not buy an iPhone - Jobs turned me off of Apple a long, long time ago.

Not sure how you got any of that from the multitude of Apple stories that have been going on everywhere.

Apple first said their customers where holding it wrong. People posted montage videos of Apple ads/commercials of people holding it in exactly the way that makes the phone drop calls.

Then Apple said that *an additional problem with the phone* was the cause of a perceived problem with the phone. Somehow these two problems were to cancel out and owners of the phone were supposed to feel better about this. All iphones have been misreporting their ability to perform their (arguably) primary function and this is being spun as a *solution* to the problem of dropped calls. Nice job, this problem just got swept under the rug, but people were still unable to make calls. The attenuation problem that they claimed all phones had was linked with this supposedly because the user was looking at a call barely connected and when the grip changed the position of the phone, the reception changed and a call was dropped. This was called normal.

It wasn't really until Consumer Reports came out with a real easy to follow video where they have the phone on and touch it in the corner and signal strength drops dramatically. No movement of the phone, very simple. Apple finally says, "Here is a free bumper to cover up the design factor we had told you to obsess over, we'd now like you to obsess over our generosity. We're still not going to really admit a problem."

Some guy gets fired, apparently getting to be the first guy to take credit for something while Jobs is in charge.

They've fired off so many excuses that it's perfectly understandable if people mix and match them a bit. They did at one point claim that the big signal drop was only an illusion caused by the software displaying too many bars in the first place. I think they mixed that with the "well everyone else has a problem too" gambit, at least for a while.

Speaking from my own anecdotal experience, I have a spot in my house, right in front of my fridge, where all of my previous phones (iPhone 3GS, original iPhone, and two Sony-Ericsson phones before that) would always drop the call if I walked into it. The iPhone 4G has no problem with it.

I don't know what to believe and I don't have an iPhone to test. I just know that they did blame software at some point. I've lost track of whether that's part of the current explanation/excuse or if it's been superseded.

It does seem that whatever it is, the problem is substantially worse than for other phones.

Alright, Bob - please elucidate. What exactly is an attenuation problem, if it's not related to the antenna? Where to all the dB come from? How are they "attenuated"? I'm not a real genius when it comes to radio propagation - but I've messed with a few radios. Some powerful, some not so powerful. Everything ALWAYS comes back to the antenna. I can hook up a 1000 watt kicker to a radio, and do nothing more than get some wires hot if I have a shitty antenna. With an exceptionally good antenna, I can take a cheap, nearly worthless citizen's band radio, and talk halfway across the country.

Let's remember that your cell phone relies on radio waves, after all. I can put a variety of portable radio sets on a coffee table in an empty room, and have you walk around the radio. There will be points where the signal is "attenuated" as you walk past, and other points where the signal seems to be blocked as you walk by. It seems to me that Apple put THIS antenna exactly where the proximity of human flesh would damage reception the most.

There was a bug in the signal strength indicator, which made the attenuation look pretty dramatic if you were in a low-signal location.

If only there were some sort of optional operating mode, something that you could call a "field test" mode, or something like that. Such a mode could replace the worthless "bar" graph with a quantitative RSSI value in dBm, displayed at 1-dB precision, so iPhone owners could tell exactly how much loss Steve's magical new antenna was causing, and under what conditions.

Oh, wait. There is such a mode, capable of being enabled on virtually any GSM phone... and Apple disabled it for the very first time when the iPhone 4 shipped.

I notice that you didn't show any evidence that my statement was incorrect, you merely bitched that Apple decided not to include the field test mode in the customer OS. Can you refute Anandtech's findings?

I should point out that most GSM phone manufacturers now make it very difficult to enable Field Test mode -- to the point of even removing the functionality from phones. Nokia is one example of a GSM phone manufacturer that has done so. So your claim that field test is "enabled on virtually any GSM phone" is false. I should know as I used to be a field testing geek until I could not longer purchase a suitable GSM/UMTS phone to do field testing with.

"There isn't an antenna problem, there's an echo-chamber problem: lots of people in the press and the blogosphere are trolling for page hits, and they're much more likely to get them with a negative story than a "it works like it should" story."

That would be a plausible explanation except that the tech press has been promoting Apple products for years. Even when the problem was discovered the press felt compelled to include positive comments on the iPhone as part of their coverage of the problem. Perhaps if

I think he's trying to. He also seems naive enough to think that upper management have anything to do with things like design details. I bet he got a gigantic payout as a recompense for taking the fall for Apple.

The guy who should be taking the fall is Jobs, for putting aethetics before technical considerations in the team's mindset, and then insulting the intelligence of his customers by claiming that a) it's their fault for holding it wrong and b) that all other smartphones suffer the same problem when th

The actual mistake was made by Jobs; trying to play down if not ridicule the customers' concerns.

Agree that was a mistake. And I haven't heard anybody claim that the stupidest "hold the phone differently" jobs email was not the real deal.

Instead of apologising, offer refunds,

I think you're confused? There WAS an offer of a full refund for anybody who wasn't happy (including all cell phone company fees)... Do you know of somebody who wasn't able to return an iPhone4 for a full refund?

No, I wasn't confused.Maybe you were, because I wrote my lines in the context of 'apology'; not in the context of 'US American consumer rights'. As someone not living in the States, that makes a huge difference. Plus the psychological effect on the consumer, when you say 'irrespective of legal issues, we will refund at any moment what turned out to be an engineering error'.

So one Steve has joined the other Steve, the one who - and that makes a difference - never shone with competence.

If you're referring to Wozniak, I'm going to take exception to your remark. I've never liked Jobs, not from day one. Anyone who "adores" Steve Jobs wasn't around back in the beginning, isn't aware of the arrogance and bungling the man exhibited early on. Once an asshole, always an asshole, and running Apple has NOT improved his demeanor nor his attitude, not one iota. Wozniak, on the other hand, was a rare spark of true genius. As someone who was very big in the Apple ][ development scene at one point, I must say Wozniak's work impressed me far more than anything Jobs did. Was the Woz a a businessman, a corporate leader? No, of course not: unlike Jobs though, he never pretended to be. But he was a hell of an engineer.

So one Steve has joined the other Steve, the one who - and that makes a difference - never shone with competence.

If you're referring to Wozniak, I'm going to take exception to your remark. I've never liked Jobs, not from day one. Anyone who "adores" Steve Jobs wasn't around back in the beginning, isn't aware of the arrogance and bungling the man exhibited early on. Once an asshole, always an asshole, and running Apple has NOT improved his demeanor nor his attitude, not one iota. Wozniak, on the other hand, was a rare spark of true genius. As someone who was very big in the Apple ][ development scene at one point, I must say Wozniak's work impressed me far more than anything Jobs did. Was the Woz a a businessman, a corporate leader? No, of course not: unlike Jobs though, he never pretended to be. But he was a hell of an engineer.

Where were you within all the chaos? I've worked for him twice. Yourself?

But the truth is it wouldn't have made a difference. All of the field testing was done with the phones inside cases made to disguise the prototypes as 3G iPhones. Left or right handed wouldn't have mattered because the flaw wouldn't manifest inside the case. Apple's obsession with secrecy with the objective of generating hype is what bit them in the ass this time.

maybe this conversation never happened. The design flaw is so blatant that it's very unlikely the engineers responsible for the RF section (including the antenna) would be so stupid. The whole fiasco smells of someone very high-up who brushed aside technical concerns for aesthetics. All we have to do is to wait for an insider to spill the beans...

I just have to wonder what was in the conversation between Jobs and Papermaster.

Steve Jobs: Ahhh, Mark, thank you for coming.Mark Papermaster: (gulps) you wanted to see me Steve.SJ: You know about this Antenna issue.MP: I hear they've dubbed it "Antennagate".SJ: (Clenches, Grits teeth) Well we've been working on a solution.MP: If we just put a tiny bit of plastic around it, we'd eliminate the majority of the problem.MP: We'd still have excellent reception and eliminate this whole "death grip" thing

It was likely that he drew up the design for the product and told engineering that they were constrained to what was on his design papers down to the every angle and curve regardless of how functional it actually was.